Daisies and violet brocades
by Little.Latina
Summary: He was home to her; he had been for a very long time, ever since he had offered her shelter after her apartment was blown up, allowing her to have breakfast with his family and sleep in one of his old t-shirts.
1. Chapter 1

The alcohol burned her throat as it flowed freely down it like a cascade, and she couldn't help but to wonder if a bullet to the mouth would taste like the light brown liquid she was suffocating the pain with. Her gun sat there on the coffee table, half indifferent and half daring, the barrel looking directly at her, resembling the black hole her life had become so similar to. Although the drapes were closed and her vision blurred, its silhouette was still distinguishable amid the darkness.

With one hand held a half-empty bottle; the other fingers were busy drawing unintelligible scribbles on the skin around the scar she had near her chest. It was similar to a love letter to, an attempt to communicate with her broken heart through incomprehensible letters written by her nails on her own abused anatomy. She hummed an unknown tune – it sounded a lot like a sad lullaby – as she lay there on the couch facing the door, lost in her thoughts, trying to write some sense into a heart that was more of a beating muscle than a beautiful piece of her with which to feel and love.

It was not the first time a shot of whiskey had led to a scene of that sort. This had been happening repeatedly, and it felt as if her soul was being mutilated in exchange of a couple of hours freedom from the horrific memories and paralyzing fears she so desperately tried to escape from. Even if this numbed state of mind would only last until the sun rose and she regained sobriety.

Her eyelids were as heavy as led, and she knew loss of consciousness was imminent, but she was fighting it with whatever little strength she still had left because it was the only form of sanity she could get. She became able to openly let out some of the poisonous ache she had been living for the last thirteen years. She willed her eyes open every time they closed without her permission, sometimes right away, sometimes after minutes had passed; she would bitterly laugh at how ironic it was: the alcohol granted her a limited amount of time to analyze and express the emotions that were always hidden behind the wall she had built to protect herself from others, but then it was cut short by collapsing her system with its effects on her body and forced her to succumb and fall asleep lulled by her own thoughts.

She wanted to stay awake, so desperately. The musings about barrels that looked like black holes and bullets that perhaps tasted like whiskey when shot inside one's mouth were starting to morph into flashes of blue eyes gazing into her green ones, a man kneeling above her on the grass pleaded with her not to abandon him, and three words that were proof she wasn't fighting the dragon alone. While drunk she allowed herself to think about death – her mother's, Coonan's, Montogmery's, and her own, among others -, to toy with the idea of putting an end to the pain by ending her existence. But, also while drunk she gave herself permission to fully remember what she struggled with on a daily basis and pretend to have forgotten it all. It was only on nights like those she had incoherent conversations with her agonizing heart about the writer that used coffee as a symbol for good morning kisses and made intense love to her with his eyes. She didn't want to fall asleep just when the fingers scraping the skin around her scar were getting to the part where they wrote to her heart about him, or when the arrhythmic tune she was humming had begun to make sense.

Her throat was hoarse and raspy. Random humming was all she could manage in her state, but to her ears it sounded like a wonderful memory, and in her mind the words were sung loud and crystal clear. The lyrics to the song that was the soundtrack to these heartbreaking nights, the song she always whispered to him in her deepest dreams, that always ended with him whispering it back to her.

"… _Though I'm here in this far off place my air is not this time and space, I draw you close with every breath. You don't know it's right until it's wrong, you don't know it's yours until it's gone, I didn't know that it was home 'till you up and left…"_

He was home to her; he had been for a very long time, ever since he had offered her shelter after her apartment was blown up. He allowed her to have breakfast with his family and sleep in one his old t-shirts. He was her time and space, her compass, her rhythm. He was everything that was right in her life, and he always found a way to right everything that was wrong. And he was hers – mind, soul, heart, body -, and would always be. And that scared her, so much that she could only admit those things to herself after drinking a bottle of whiskey, so much that she could only let those certainties be her comfort the minutes before passing out. Deep thoughts on human misery, love, life, death and everything in between always came easier to her if the cap of a bottle had been unscrewed first.

She hated herself every time she did that (well, she hated herself the morning after) and the aching in her soul only increased every time she mutilated it by getting drunk. She lay there humming to herself and alternating thoughts between the damage she could do to herself with her gun if she held it close and pulled the trigger, and the good that hopefully would come if she allowed him to tear the wall down. When it came to him and everything that had happened ever since the night Roy Montgomery had met his death, drowning her sorrows in liquor seemed appropriate.

The neck of the bottle slipped through her fingers the second before she finally lost conscious. Katherine Beckett didn't hear the sound it made when it shattered into a million glass splinters. She was already lost inside a typewriter dreams; reliving her mother's murder, shooting Dick Coonan, crying over Montgomery's body, being shot to the chest, gazing into his eyes as he told he loved her, waking up in a hospital bed hooked to all sorts of machines…

She fought the nightmares so hard she fell off the couch and landed on the glass splinters that covered the wooden floor. The ashes from what earlier that evening had been an unscratched bottle penetrated her, cutting the skin of her forearms, palms, cheeks and knees. She was so numbed by the alcohol the pain didn't wake her; she simply slept through it all, like she did every time she succumbed to the need of getting drunk.

She was still sleeping by dawn, but the nightmares had being replaced with images of him holding her to his chest, singing in her ear: _"I keep you in a flower vase with your fatalism and your crooked face with the daisies and the violet brocades. And you keep me in a vacant lot in the ivy and forget-me-nots hoping you will come and untangle me one of these days"_

One of the splinters cuts into her bottom lip when she smiled in her sleep. There inside her head she had worked up the courage to confess to the man she adored that she needed him to come and untangle her.

The sooner, the better.


	2. Chapter 2

She sat on the bathroom floor, the first aid kit she kept home opened before her, tending to the cuts and bruises that were the consequences of her throwing alcohol into a nervous breakdown and then lying on the floor trying to 'write' some sense into a heart that was too scared, too broken and too fragile to even classify as one capable of loving fully but that still had some beats left to give. Along had come a pounding headache and an even worse feeling of guilt and self-deprecation; both discomforts she had started to associate with the hours that followed her regaining of sobriety.

She closed her eyes and rested her head against the white tiled wall. Her head and heart were pounding, the ache in both unbearable. She was so tired of feeling such terrible pain every time something - _anything_ - triggered the memories of Captain Montgomery's death, or her mom's, or their funerals', or the shooting and everything that followed suit, including that particular case a few weeks ago that had made her become so aware of the PTSD that had her trapped as its victim practically since she had woken up in a hospital bed, hooked to machines, a scar in her chest, a cruel reality crashing down on her…

She was tired of trying to carry the weight of the world on her shoulders.

She was tired of the weight of the world crashing down on her.

She was tired of being so scared to let him help her carry the weight of _her_ world.

But on top of everything, she was tired of missing him terribly, desperately; she was tired of needing him so much she couldn't bare the existence she was forcing herself to have just because she was too scared to risk it all, just because she was terrified of losing someone she loved more than her own life _again_; going through that once had been more than enough; in fact, going through that once had almost got her killed by her own suffering, and the mere possibility of another tragic ending thrown in the middle while she was forced to move on... well, she wasn't sure she would be able to find in herself the will to move on a second time, especially because the person that had pulled her out of her misery when she was a sad young woman facing a world without her mother in it was the one she was scared fate would take away from her if she claimed him her own and admitted to him being her soul mate, her other half, her everything, her _always._

It was so exquisitely contradictory - she thought as she tried to force some cool water down her throat, just to find it clogged by a knot: she was deeply in love with a man that she knew was hers just like her own bones, flesh and blood were, a man she knew adored her as she did him if not even more and that would willing come between her chest and a bullet any given day; she yearned to be with him, her lips were dying of thirst for his kisses, her body was hungry for his caresses... She needed him physically, emotionally, intellectually, and she very well knew they were each other to have and to hold, had been for a long time. The belonged _together and to one another_, all laws and forces of the Universe in favor of their being together. But they _weren't_, because she was scared, because her soul had been wounded the moment Dick Coonan stabbed Johanna Beckett and even though if Castle had been holding it together for nearly fourteen years (through his writing first, and then the man himself from the moment he worked his way into her life on), it was still too fragile, so much than joining it with him to then have it ripped away by destiny without so much as a warning would be fatal. She was his, and he was hers, and they wanted to be together more than anything, and they were each other's _always_, but they kept on hiding behind a partnership as solid as her wall, no going further, because losing what she had only had _metaphorically_ wouldn't destroy her as much as losing what she had _actually_ had, what she had known and held and cherished to miss and die without.

So she had him, but at the same time she didn't, and she was his completely, but at the same time she was still free (was she really?), and they belonged to each other but they weren't together, and she would die without him - she _was_ dying without him -, but she'd rather be robbed from unfulfilled dreams and fantasies and _what ifs _and _if only's_ than real memories of a life with him, a home with him, a family with him. She would die anyway, that she knew for sure, but at least it would be less painful, the agony would be less tangible, and maybe it would even kill her faster, straighter. 

She hit her head against the wall and bit on her lower lip until blood was drawn. It tasted as bitter as all of the contradictions their weight she was suffocating under. She was so tired of that as much as she was tired of everything else, the physical pains to numb the emotional ache…

It needed to stop.

She had to make it stop.

_I don't want to go down the same path my dad chose when my mom was murdered _she would think, her tear-stained face contracted in a grimace of almost unbearable physical and emotional pain. _I don't want to let her down. _

"_You can't let her down, Kate"_ Doctor Burke's voice would echo inside her head every time it was crossed by that thought, immediately followed by a different reverberate, the one she had given him: _"I want to be more than what I am". _She wouldn't accomplish much by carrying on with that pattern of behavior, she knew that alright; but her fears and insecurities ran way too deep, almost as deep as the cuts its proper healing she was seeing to, if not deeper.

_I can't keep doing this to myself._

She needed to sort things out. She needed to sort herself out. If she wanted to be more, if she wanted to be happy, if she wanted to change, mistakes like those she had to spend the afternoon cleaning after couldn't keep being made. She was not her father, and she was not about to become what he had. She wasn't going do that to him, or to Rick, or to herself, or to the perspective of the future she had told Doctor Burke she wanted to build.

"I don't want to keep building walls to hide behind" she had told him "I want to stop shielding my heart. Life's got so many tools to offer… and making these walls taller is not what I want to use them for. I want to build a different future than the one I would be doomed to have if I kept on denying these feelings and hiding in nowhere relationships with men I don't love and letting my mother's case consume me and define me and leading me anywhere but a happy, stable place"

_You told Doctor Burke all of that. You told him you wanted to change. You told him you wanted things to be different. You told him you were ready. But your actions do not match what you say, Katherine. Your actions do not match the advice he's been giving you. You're being eating alive by the fears and the nightmares and the ghosts and you're still going to burry yourself in the bottom of a bottle every time you want to connect with your heart and the raw, overwhelming feelings you've got for your best friend and partner… You do not want this. You do not deserve this. What is it that you want, Kate? _

She hushed the voice inside her head (that voice that sounded so suspiciously like her mother's, which only made matters worse on days like those), but the question it had asked kept floating in her mind.

_What is it that you want, Kate?_

She was scared of admitting it, even if it was to herself only, even if it was in the loneliness of her bathroom, with no one to see her breaking down like that, with no one to judge her, with no one to lecture her about lost opportunities and _what ifs_ and _if only's_, with no one to point out her mistakes or call her a liar.

"You need to start admitting things to yourself, Kate" Doctor Burke had told her.

What was she ready to admit?

What could she admit to herself right there, right then?

_Maybe I can start by admitting what I do not want_, she thought.

She didn't want to be like this. She didn't want to become a shadow of what her dad had been before she made him sober up (not without an incredible amount of strength and courage and will power from her part at the cost of a good portion of her mental health). She didn't want to spend her nights off cuddling a bottle of whiskey and having drunk talks with her terribly scared broken heart. She didn't want to spend her days off nursing herself back to sobriety, sitting on the bathroom floor tending to the cuttings in her arms, knees and legs. She didn't want to think of him and what he meant to her only when numb by the alcohol (curious, wasn't it? When numb by the alcohol she was able to get in touch with her deepest, purest, best kept feelings). She didn't want a wall made of her insecurities, fears and past burdens standing between the two of them anymore.

_Okay, Kate. That you do not want. Now, what is it that you want?_

She took another deep breath. If she wished for things to change, if she wished to be more than what she was, she had to start admitting stuff to at least herself, didn't she?

She wanted to be with him. More than anything in the world, she longed to be with him, lost in his arms to never be found again. She wanted to be held by him, kissed by him, lulled to sleep by his voice. She wanted to be his muse, his one and only, and she wanted him to be her one and done. She wanted to share every day she had left with him…

_I want 'always' with him_.

And as that realization rushed over her body, she closed her eyes and allowed herself to cry out of the desperate love she felt for him and the insecurities and fears that she was battling against, this time without the need of ingesting alcohol first to connect with the broken heart that waited restlessly under the scar on her skin that he would have all of his possessions to have in his hadn't the bullet been faster.


End file.
